EMBARK Spring Webinars

EMBARK is starting a webinar series where invited speakers will be presenting their research and be contrasted to EMBARK members presenting the work performed in the project. This will be followed by a discussion and Q&A. All the webinars, except for one, will take place at 14:00 CEST.

Four webinars will take place before the summer break:

  • April 28: Gerry Wright – “Approaches to measure and monitor AMR in various environments”
    Luis Pedro Coelho – “Quantifying AMR at very large scales”
    [Register]
  • May 19: Heike Schmitt – “International efforts for One Health surveillance of AMR (WHO Tricycle)”
    Etienne Ruppé – “On the use of Tricycle in EMBARK”
    [Register]
  • June 9: Dearbháile Morris – “What lurks beneath: the role of water in the transmission and persistence of AMR”
    Rabaab Zahra – “E. coli STs and Resistance Mechanisms in Sewage from Islamabad”
    [Register]
  • June 30 **13:00 CEST*: Kimberly Kline – “Pathogenesis and persistence during Enterococcus faecalis biofilm-associated infection”
    Sofia Forslund – High-throughput measurement of host and microbiota
    [Register]

Here is also a sneak peek at the first webinars of the fall:

  • September 1: Amy Pruden – “Towards coordinated local and global surveillance of antibiotic resistance at wastewater treatment plants”
    Thomas Berendonk – “AMR in WWTPs – the European perspective”
  • September 22: Gautam Dantas – “Predicting and Combating Biotic and Abiotic Perturbations to Diverse Microbiomes”
    Johan Bengtsson-Palme – “Antibiotic perturbations to interactions in microbial communities”
  • October 13: Barry McMahon – “How AMR in wildlife can inform zoonoses research”
    Victor Hugo Jarquin Diaz – “AMR spread in rodents”

Coronavirus-related setbacks

Unfortunately, the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is impacting some of the EMBARK communications and outreach as well, and I regret to inform you that today’s meeting with on NordicMappingAMR arranged by the Swedish Medical Products Agency where we would have presented and discussed EMBARK has been cancelled and postponed until after the summer.

Similarly, the workshop and seminar on monitoring of antibiotic resistance in the environment organized by Resistomap and others that was to take place in late April in Helsinki, and where EMBARK was going to be presented, has also been postponed until August.

Finally, the team is discussing how to best proceed with e.g. sampling strategies in the time of lockdowns and travel restrictions. We are still working on this, but at this point this only looks like it will delay portions of the program, and not have major impacts on the research activities. This analysis may of course change depending on how the COVID-19 outbreak develops.